


passionfruit (the should've seen it coming remix)

by facingthenorthwind (spacegandalf)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Fake/Pretend Relationship, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-02
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2020-04-06 12:09:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19062403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacegandalf/pseuds/facingthenorthwind
Summary: “How would you feel about a free trip to France this summer?” Marlene says, but there’s something odd in the way she’s standing, holding herself a little too still to be truly relaxed.“That depends,” Sirius says, putting his hands in his pockets and leaning against the wall. “What’s the catch?”On one hand, hedoesquite like France. On the other, he can’t imagine he’s the first choice Marlene would have for a holiday companion.





	passionfruit (the should've seen it coming remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [poppunkpadfoot (StormVandal)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StormVandal/gifts).
  * Inspired by [passionfruit](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15286125) by [poppunkpadfoot (StormVandal)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StormVandal/pseuds/poppunkpadfoot). 



> This is a remix of poppunkpadfoot's _passionfruit_ , which is such an excellent oneshot that at parts I complained that there was nothing I could do to improve on perfection. As it's a POV swap, all the dialogue between sirius and marlene belongs to kayla -- I've just added all the non-marlene interactions. Endless thanks to kayla and ivy, who cheerleaded (cheerled??) this entire thing and to meandminniemcg and luminousgloom for reassuring me at the last moment that it wasn't terrible.

i.  
Marlene is a good sort. She possesses all the most essential characteristics for a friend, in Sirius’s opinion: a healthy disdain for authority, a willingness to go to the mat for a sports team she has no actual influence over, and she has never once come onto him. This last is particularly impressive, as Sirius estimates that at least eighty percent of the female population of Hogwarts of a certain age has.

It’s a burden, being as beautiful as he is.

So he’s not particularly worried when she calls him over after Charms, though he’s not sure what she wants with him. Clearly it’s not a thing she wants an audience for; he tells the rest of the Marauders to go on without him and James gives him a salute before resuming both his impassioned defence of the Cannons (keep dreaming, mate) to Peter and his wandering towards the staircase. Marlene seems uncharacteristically nervous, so he asks her what he can help her with, just to speed this whole interaction along. He does have to get to Transfiguration eventually, and McGonagall is not as enamoured of his winning smile as the rest of the Hogwarts population.

“How would you feel about a free trip to France this summer?” she says, but there’s something odd in the way she’s standing, holding herself a little too still to be truly relaxed.

“That depends,” he says, putting his hands in his pockets and leaning against the wall. “What’s the catch?”

On one hand, he _does_ quite like France — and since James always goes to India in the summer, he’s not really going to get another chance, now that he’s been officially disowned. On the other, he can’t imagine he’s the first choice Marlene would have for a holiday companion.

“It’s a trip with my family,” Marlene says, and Sirius tries to remember if Marlene has mentioned her family in the past — whether they’re sympathetic to the Death Eaters or not, or perhaps they’re just good old fashioned racists. He almost misses the way that Marlene pauses, not quite looking at him as she says, “I’d be introducing you as my boyfriend.”

For a moment Sirius thinks maybe he’s misheard. Has he misread some cue from Marlene this whole time? Has he been leading her on? He's generally in the business of leading girls on, because that suits his needs just fine and he… well, look, he isn’t being a dickhead on _purpose_. This time.

Okay, so that argument is pretty hard to win, but he really does value Marlene as a friend, and this is coming so out of left field. Steeling himself to let her down, he says, “Is this your way of subtly asking me out? Because if it is, I have to say, it’s not as subtle as you might be going for.”

The sigh he gets in response pretty clearly indicates that it was in fact not what she was going for at all, thank God. Girls always seem to get so het up when he turns them down, despite the fact that he has a reputation for being Bad at Relationships — which is surely undesirable and doesn’t inspire confidence. (He hopes he is only bad at relationships with girls, and not fundamentally broken and unworthy of — no, no, let’s not think about it.)

“I’m asking you to come to France, pretend to be my boyfriend, and not ask too many questions. You get a free vacation out of it. What do you say?” 

Sirius hesitates, chewing on his thumb as he thinks. He can’t say it’s his ideal holiday activity, pretending to date someone. On the other hand, Marlene wouldn’t be asking if she didn’t have a reason and sure, she said not to ask questions, but perhaps it will be obvious once he gets there. He’s about to say yes when he suddenly realises that this could be Marlene getting stuck in some minor French city where there are too many muggles for quidditch but not enough to have anything genuinely interesting going on.

“Where in France?”

She makes some weird noise halfway between a bark of laughter and a snort before saying, “Corsica.”

He could work with Corsica. Plenty of beaches.

“Alright,” Sirius says. “Alright. I just — I need to check with someone first.” A little thrill goes through him as he remembers that he’s no longer a single man, free to fake-date anyone he pleases. Well, he’s never fake-dated anyone, but even if he wanted to, he’s kind of missed his window. Probably. 

It’s only as he sees Marlene frown a little in response that he realises he didn’t have any good reason to ask anyone, as far as she’s concerned. What if she — no, that’s absurd. She’s not going to find out. And even if she does, he doesn’t care what she thinks. The way that his heart is beating faster just at the thought doesn’t help convince him of that, but it’s true, he _doesn’t_. Or… he won’t, if she reacts poorly. He’s got all the friends he needs.

For all that, she only says, “Okay. Just… let me know soon, yeah?”

He tries to relax. If he’s worked up it’ll make it more obvious. Also, shit, he’s genuinely going to be late for Transfiguration now.

He forces himself to stroll casually away, as if that’s going to help anything.

  
  


ii.  
It’s only after dinner that Sirius gets the opportunity to fill the rest of the Marauders in on the conversation. They’re sitting in their dorm, halfheartedly poking at the Map as if sheer will can stop the moving doorways from glitching out the entire third floor. It’s frustrating because they’re so _close_ — sure, they haven’t mapped the dungeons at all, and still haven’t worked out how to get into the other common rooms, but they all know the potential of what they have already.

They just need to work out how to get there.

“Marlene wants me to pretend to be her boyfriend during the summer. Asked me to go on some family trip to Corsica.”

James immediately says, “Corsica, nice.”

Remus, who is the only one whose opinion actually matters, is slower to reply. “Why?”

“Didn’t say. She doesn’t want me to ask questions, that’s part of the free trip.”

“And what would fake dating entail? Surely her parents will expect you to actually look like you’re in love, or something.” Sirius watches in case Remus seems distressed by this — but he mostly just looks fed up with the Map in front of him. Finally Remus apparently just gives up and digs out the block of chocolate he bought last weekend, already three-quarters gone. Once the chocolate’s out, there’s no hope for further Map work. It’s the sign that things are Done, at least for the time being.

“Dunno. I’m sure I can put down ground rules? She’s the one asking me the favour. Worst case, I guess I can do a dramatic breakup in Corsica and come back early.”

“How long’s the trip?” Remus asks through a mouthful of chocolate.

Sirius is realising these are probably things he should have asked about. As it is, he can only shrug. 

“I can find out? I mean, she doesn’t want anyone else knowing about the fake dating, probably, so don’t tell her you know or anything. But if you’re not comfortable then I won’t do it.”

“I’d probably have more of a problem if I had to watch, but I’m certainly not going to be in Corsica. Just don’t go around snogging her all the time, I guess. The minimum amount of kissing.”

“If she’s not tried to kiss me before, I don’t know why she’d start now. She laughed when I suggested it was an unsubtle way to come onto me, so I think I’m safe in that department.”

“Good.” Remus then leans over and kisses him himself, his hand curling at the nape of Sirius’s neck. They’ve been dating for over a month and it doesn’t get less exciting for Sirius that he can just kiss Remus whenever he wants. Well, in the dorm. Neither of them particularly want to deal with the fallout of kissing in public — at least, not yet. Sirius would be more than happy to rub Regulus’s face in it, and absolutely ready to hex anyone who dared look at them funny, but Remus doesn’t want the attention. Too much scrutiny might jeopardise other, bigger secrets. But Sirius is happy to wait.

Sirius is happy to wait forever as long as he could have Remus in private. 

James says, “Oi, get a room, dickheads,” which Sirius doesn’t even bother breaking the kiss to respond to. He just flips the bird in his general direction and puts a hand in Remus’s hair. 

He's the luckiest man in the world.

  
  


iii.  
The next day he tells Marlene at lunch to meet him in the common room that evening. Thankfully, no one apparently feels like sticking around and Sirius comes down from the dorm as soon as he sees the last person leave the common room on the Map. 

He expects Marlene to say something first, but when she remains silent a beat too long, he says, “Okay, if we’re going to do this, we should probably come to a proper agreement.”

She finally relaxes for the first time Sirius has seen this week, slumping back like a puppet with its strings cut. “You’re a lifesaver, mate,” she says, and Sirius wonders for the first time if this is more serious than some grandma wanting to see Marlene has prospects. 

“Do I get some background first? Why am I pretending to be your boyfriend?”

Marlene hesitates for a moment. “My parents are always nagging me about getting a boyfriend, so I told them I had one. And now they want to meet my mystery boyfriend, and I know they won’t drop it. So here we are.” There’s something about it that doesn’t ring quite true — maybe it’s the hesitation, or the forced lightness in her tone. Either way, Sirius files it away as a thing to contemplate later.

“Parents.” Sirius shakes his head. “They’re always hung up on the oddest shit. You’d think they’d want you concentrating on school instead of boys, wouldn’t you?” His parents would certainly have preferred — well, they’d have preferred a lot of things, and none of them were worth entertaining.

“Who cares about my 3 Os and 4 Es,” Marlene says bitterly. “I think they’d have been happier if I’d gotten all As and told them it was because I was distracted by a boy.”

“Well,” says Sirius. “We’ll give them distracted.” He doesn’t much care that Marlene apparently isn’t telling him the whole truth — the only way he can see it actually affecting him is if she _is_ secretly harbouring a giant crush on him, in which case he can try to let her down gently. The excitement of fake dating far outweighs that possibility anyway: there’s nothing more satisfying that successfully pulling off a caper, except pulling off a caper to fool someone’s parents. 

“We’ve been dating since April,” she says, grinning for the first time Sirius has seen in a while. “That’s what I told them.”

He nods, scratching his chin a little. “I’m cool with hand-holding and all the other cuddly shit, but I’m only okay with kissing if it’s absolutely necessary.” He doesn’t want to rule it out completely, because he understands that there could be times that it’s essential for keeping up the ruse, and there’s no point in agreeing to do this and then sabotaging its success to that extent.

Marlene snorts with laughter, and Sirius grins. “Told you we needed to come to an agreement, didn’t I?”

“You did, I just didn’t realize you’d thought about it so extensively is all,” she says, and Sirius opens his mouth to make some kind of protest but decides against it. He doesn’t want to have some kind of ‘the lady doth protest too much’ situation making this more complicated than it already is. He’s got enough secrets to be getting on with without making Marlene suspicious. “That all sounds fine to me.”

“It’s a deal then,” says Sirius, and they shake on it. The other details are easy to hash out — how they started dating (Sirius had serenaded her at breakfast in order to ask her to Hogsmeade), Marlene’s parents’ views on the War (Marlene’s father is an Auror, and she warns him that he’s going to start on the back foot because of his name; luckily, this is not the first time Sirius has had to defend himself from similar assumptions). She doesn’t ask further questions about who he had to check with before he agreed to this, and he doesn’t ask further questions about why he’s doing this in the first place. 

Everyone wins.

  
  


iv.  
Corsica is absolutely beautiful. He smashes meeting Marlene’s parents, with an assist from Marlene, who does plenty of lovesick giggling. It’s nice to know his singular talent for charming parents remains as strong as ever. He and Marlene spend most of their time at the beach — her parents can’t hear what they’re saying when they’re in the surf, which means it’s a reprieve from pretending to be in love. That said, the pretending isn’t as difficult as Sirius worried it might be — not that he _does_ fancy her or anything; more that all his previous experience with girls had been ones who wanted to date him. 

Sirius gave girls a red hot go, and he’s sure anyone would be willing to back that claim up. The problem was that girls were just… the experience of dating them was kind of boring. Not girls themselves — he likes being friends with them plenty — but he always felt that there was something essential he was missing when it came to dating them. They usually wanted to snog a lot, which would have been fine if they were Remus (because they do snog a lot and it is _incredible_ ), but as it was Sirius just found himself planning his Transfiguration essay or thinking about how they could improve the Map. Even the time he had sex with Nelly Chessington was — a way to pass the time? She was excellent at giving blowjobs, and eating her out was at the very least a novel experience, but he can’t say he’s thought about it much since.

In contrast, Remus — well, he thinks about Remus a _lot_.

He’s not had to do more than kiss Marlene on the cheek so far, and it’s easy enough to put his arm around her whenever they’re sitting next to each other. She’s less bony than Remus, which he’s not afraid to admit is a plus, and she smells nice (most girls do, he’s found) and it’s barely forty-eight hours before it feels completely natural.

Marlene keeps looking at him far more than he looks at her — he catches her sometimes, and instead of looking away she holds his gaze. There’s something almost like panic in her eyes that Sirius doesn’t understand.

It’s not like they’re being faced with scepticism from her parents — so what’s she got to worry about?

  
  


v.  
He gets a letter from James three days in, asking after the success of the scheme and inquiring whether Sirius has pulled any hot French boys. Sirius isn’t sure why James bothers; surely they both know that the hottest possible boy is currently in Wales. Even if Sirius were interested in hot French boys, there’s not much opportunity, unless he wants to do it at the beach while Marlene’s parents are in town. 

Marlene seems increasingly exhausted, which Sirius is pretty sure is the opposite intention of a holiday. He’s not sure how to help — she doesn’t express that she’s dissatisfied by Sirius’s behaviour, and Sirius has plenty of positive reinforcement from her parents. At one point her mother even asks about his religion, and when he says he doesn’t have one she looks at him consideringly. He wonders if the McKinnons are already planning the wedding — a bit premature, but if he hadn’t been disowned he would probably have a match arranged already. Thankfully, no literature mysteriously appears in the little guesthouse he’s staying in (odd that they’re so pleased he’s here and yet go to great lengths to separate him and Marlene — heterosexuals are very strange), but it throws him off his game a little. 

He thinks maybe someone will comment, but no one does. The McKinnons converse extraordinarily little for people who are frequently in the same place — and that’s coming from someone who used to live in Grimmauld Place. 

Multiple times he opens his mouth to say something to Marlene when they’re at the beach, or after he’s watched her push food around her plate instead of eating it. He’s never sure what to say, though, so he just pretends he hasn’t noticed. Finally, two days before the end of the trip, he’s had enough — Marlene looks more like a ghost than a girl who’s on holiday with her boyfriend and her parents, and his attempts to help by being more lovey-dovey go completely unnoticed.

After Marlene’s parents have gone to bed, he sneaks out of the guesthouse and collects some pebbles from the garden before positioning himself underneath Marlene’s window. He could just use the door and sneak up to her room, but he suspects that would be more likely to wake up her parents, who may well decide he’s no longer the best thing since sliced bread if it seems like he’s actually trying to shag his seventeen-year-old fake girlfriend. 

It takes a few pebbles before Marlene opens the window and asks what he’s doing. This seems like a pretty stupid question, given the circumstances, but clearly she’s off her game. “Come for a walk with me,” he says instead of explaining.

“I’m tired, Sirius,” she says, which is wild, because she has clearly not been sleeping all week and Sirius doesn’t imagine she’s about to start now. He just raises his eyebrows and she relents, coming downstairs in short order. He leads them down the road to the beach, and waits until they’re as far from civilisation as they can reasonably get before speaking.

“Why am I here, Marlene?” He resists the urge to look at her; he’s worried if he does, she’ll spook and refuse to say anything.

“I thought we agreed no questions,” she says, which is clearly bullshit.

“I’ve just been trying to understand it. Because the thing is, Marls — don’t get me wrong or anything, I’ve had a lovely time and all, but it doesn’t seem like it matters all that much that I’m here.” He and Marlene spend almost entire days away from Marlene’s parents, after all, and they haven’t asked how they started dating or what Sirius plans to do after school or any of the questions he’d been expecting coming into this. He’d been expecting… _something_. This has just been slightly unsettling.

“Can we sit down?” Marlene says after a silence so long Sirius had almost checked to see she was still there.

The beach is still pleasant, despite the fact that the temperature has dropped since the sun went down, and he tries to give her time as they sit down. Something’s clearly wrong, but he doesn’t have any idea what.

“I need you to be here because I’m trying to stop my parents from getting suspicious,” Marlene says at last. 

Sirius looks over at her. That tells him absolutely nothing — he could have guessed that the moment she asked him to come, back in May. “Suspicious about…?” he prompts. Surely it’s not suspicious about the fact that her boyfriend is pretend. That wouldn’t keep her awake at night, not with how well her parents have swallowed the show they’ve been putting on.

There’s silence, and it feels like time stretches, like seconds are entire minutes, here on the beach with nobody around and no signs of life save for the sound of the cicadas in the distance.

Finally, the answers Sirius has been seeking fall out of Marlene like she’s not even in control of them, too fast and clumsy to be anything but some kind of force of nature, vomiting forth. “When I imagine falling in love, it’s with a woman,” she says. “When I imagine sex, it’s with a woman. And I just — the idea of being with a man, I can’t — it makes me feel sick. I can’t — I don’t know what’s wrong with me—”

“Marlene,” Sirius says, cutting her off. He feels irrationally like he should have realised this was coming somehow, that he should have guessed. He should have been able to see it. No wonder she’d never hit on him, no wonder she’d laughed back when he suggested this was a come-on. 

Marlene’s breaths are coming in gasps, like she can’t quite get enough air and he wants to give her a hug but he doesn’t know if she wants to be touched. Instead he tries to put all his emotion into his voice as he says, “Listen to me, okay? There is nothing wrong with you.”

She looks up, straight at his face, and she seems so — so small and lost and he has the overwhelming and profoundly unhelpful desire to punch something. She lets out a sob and it seems to take her by surprise, like she doesn’t know what’s going on in her own body. Like she’s divorced herself from it to such an extent she can’t recognise it.

“You aren’t broken,” Sirius promises. “And you’re not alone. I know it feels as though you’re both, but I promise you’re not.”

“How do you know?” she says, and she sounds almost angry at him. Like this truth is all she knows and even though she hates it, it’s something familiar to her, like a piece of driftwood in the middle of the ocean. “What am I, if I’m not broken?”

“A lesbian,” Sirius says, shrugging. He doesn’t know if that’s how she’d want to identify, and he’s sure it could be more complicated than that, but it’s a good enough place to start. She gasps, and he wonders if she genuinely doesn’t know, or it’s just that hearing it out loud makes it more real. Surely the latter — he can’t say he’s sought it out, this knowledge that there are girls who only want to kiss girls, but he doesn’t know when he learnt it. The sky is blue, the Wimbourne Wasps are shit, lesbians exist. “There’s nothing wrong with that. You’re certainly not the only one.”

“Why do you sound so sure about it?” she asks defiantly. “What would you know about being a — a lesbian?”

She’s got him there.

Sirius Black, possibly the furthest away from being a lesbian it is possible to be.

It feels like all his self-righteous anger at anyone who had ever made Marlene afraid disappears. Sure, Marlene deserves nothing but good things and probably some therapy and a girlfriend, but Sirius?

He talks a big talk about waiting for Remus to feel comfortable being out, but it’s mostly just a convenient pretense so he doesn’t have to think about the way it fills him with terror, the concept of everyone _knowing_. It doesn’t make any sense — everyone knows James fancies Lily, everyone knows plenty of straight people and their romantic feelings and whatever, but what if Sirius is — wrong, somehow? What if it’s a mistake? What if he needs to take it back at some point, what if he wakes up and Remus Lupin is not actually the thing the entire world revolves around, what if maybe mates just want to snog mates sometimes and he ends up married to some woman and has extremely boring sex once a month and— 

“My parents kicked me out because I’m gay,” he says quietly. He doesn’t look at Marlene because what if Marlene knows, what if she points out that he’s had girlfriends, that maybe he’s just not tried dating enough girls, what if Nelly Chessington was actually not very good at sex and it’s unreasonable to decide he’s gay just because he’d had more fun writing an Arithmancy essay (he doesn’t actually take Arithmancy; he’d written Remus’s essay on a whim because that way Remus would have more time for pranks and, if he is allowed to boast, “Remus” got full marks on it). 

“So the person you had to check with,” Marlene says slowly, “they’re a…” 

For some reason, completely irrationally Sirius expects her to finish the sentence with ‘werewolf’. The thing she does say is in fact worse.

“Oh my god,” she exclaims. “James?”

He’s pretty sure he chokes on his own tongue in his haste to correct her. “No!” he says. “Merlin, no. Even if I wanted James I’d be shit out of luck, the poor sod’s genuinely gone for Lily Evans. No.” His mind wanders a little as he considers that James _is_ quite fit, but certainly not the most attractive Marauder by any stretch of the imagination. 

Well, Sirius’s imagination.

“Well then, who…” Marlene says, and Sirius wonders for a moment if he should be telling her — if it’s his secret. He decides it kind of is, because it takes two to tango (he’s never danced with Remus, maybe he should…?) both in the literal sense and also the sense of him and Remus snogging at every opportunity.

It’s coming up on the full moon, and Sirius looks up at the sky and thinks about how in a matter of days he’ll be in Wales, eating Mrs Lupin’s food and asking Mr Lupin for new stories about screaming boggarts and probably trying not to look like he would like to jump their son’s bones.

“Remus,” Marlene says, and Sirius isn’t sure if it’s just the most obvious guess (after James, really?) or if it’s written on his face somehow. He can’t find it in him to care much.

“I’m in love with him,” he says as he stares up at the sky, clear and full of stars. He feels giddy, like the love and joy is going to spill out of him, and he laughs. “Shit, I’ve not said that out loud before. That felt fucking good.”

“You should tell him,” Marlene says, watching him, and Sirius imagines maybe there’s the ghost of a smile there — surely she can see how wonderful this is, how wonderful Remus is, how — 

“Yeah,” he says, still grinning. He imagines Remus’s face when he does it — maybe he’ll say it right into his mouth when they’re kissing, or maybe he’ll whisper it curled up around him at night. “Maybe I will.”

  
  


vi.  
They spend some minutes just sitting there on the beach, the sound of the cicadas and the waves a soothing constant. He doesn’t really know what to say — he feels like he’s not qualified to help her, what with being a whole bundle of fear himself, but at least he has people he knows love him — when he’d arrived at the Potters’ house last year, wet and shivering and with an ugly bruise blooming on his cheek, they’d asked what happened and he had looked into their kind, worried faces and told them the truth because he didn’t have it in him to lie anymore.

Once Mrs Potter had convinced Mr Potter that it was a terrible idea to go over to Grimmauld Place and give Sirius’s parents a piece of his mind, they’d had only words of love and acceptance for him, even though Sirius had thought… Well, Sirius had had a lot of thoughts, and he wishes that he could give Marlene the same feeling that James did when he took him upstairs to get changed into dry clothes — he’d just hugged him tightly for an entire minute and then looked him in the eye and told Sirius he loved him. There had been no qualifications or conditions, just the feeling of finally being home.

Two days later, when the bruise on his cheek was a yellowish-green, Mrs Potter asked if he had a boyfriend — as if it were just a completely normal question, like asking what subjects he was taking for NEWTs or if he’d seen the results of the latest Arrows match. He shook his head and haltingly explained what had happened, which they pointedly had not asked about: he’d reluctantly attended a dinner party at Malfoy Manor and he’d kissed Frederic Macmillan (you know, Prongs, the Ravenclaw chaser from two years ago) and Regulus had seen and then, well… he gestured at his face and no one asked for further details.

He knows he’s not got the history with Marlene to be as comforting as the Potters, so he says nothing, and when Marlene begins to shiver in the night air he offers her a hand to pull herself up. As they’re walking back he tries to work out what to say — what he can say, after she’s trusted him with this.

“I know it’s hard,” he says at last, looking at his feet. “I thought I was broken too. Just… try to let it happen, okay? Don’t try to force yourself to be something you’re not. I know from experience that it’s fucking painful and it doesn’t work.” He thinks of all the years he wasted trying to please his parents and takes a particularly vicious kick at a pebble, watching it disappear into the darkness in front of them.

“What about my parents?”

Sirius almost laughs, but stops himself at the last second. “I’m the last person on earth who’s going to advocate for telling your parents at all costs,” he says. “But you can accept the truth about yourself without telling everybody that truth. And I’ll always be around if you need a cover.” He decides not to mention the conditions on that — he probably can’t be her cover at Hogwarts, for instance. But that seems wildly unlikely anyway, so instead he can just offer himself to her for whatever she needs. 

“Thank you,” she says, and Sirius watches her swallow several times, as if there’s something stuck in her throat. He squeezes her shoulder and they part ways, he to the guesthouse and she to the main one.

He resolutely does not try to play back every interaction he’s ever had with her to figure out when he should have known, and instead falls asleep soon after his head hits the pillow.

  
  


vii.  
He’s awoken by the tapping of an owl against the windowpane and lets it in to discover he’s got a letter from Remus at last. Well, technically it’s only been a week since his last letter, and if he said something that sappy to James he’d get teased mercilessly for it, but he’s missed Remus, even so.

The letter is so — Sirius can picture Remus writing it, wants to treasure it: the little flicks Remus does at the end of words, the brown smudge that Sirius strongly suspects is chocolate on the parchment. The owl is less keen on Sirius just standing there with a giddy grin on his face and hoots at him expectantly, so Sirius goes outside and sits underneath the tree in the garden and begins to write. It feels… wrong, somehow, to tell Remus about Marlene — for one, he hasn’t asked Marlene if he can, and it doesn’t feel like something that should go in a letter anyway. 

Instead, he responds to all the little mundane details Remus has included in his letter: his ongoing war with the cat (a fat, marmalade old tom by the name of Tibby who is almost as old as Remus is, and yet wages a cold war with him that is conducted mostly through strategic vomiting); his mother’s new hobby of seamstressing; his father getting published in an academic journal.

He tells Remus of the beach, of he and Marlene daring each other to taste seaweed they pulled up (the one that looks like lettuce is fairly benign, but the one with little pustules is Definitely Not Benign and should be avoided at all costs), of the passionfruit sorbet sold by a cafe in town. He tells him of Marlene’s parents and how little effort he has to put into pretending to be Marlene’s boyfriend. He tells him of the horrible sunburn he got on his second day in Corsica, how his shoulders were an angry red and his lips had swelled up.

He tells him of how much he wishes he were in Wales with him already, even if the weather in Corsica is infinitely better, and how James had already called him a sap even though he hadn’t even mentioned Remus in his last letter. (He doesn’t mind being called a sap because it’s true, and he loves Remus Lupin, and he wishes he weren’t afraid for everyone to know it.)

When he’s finished, he sends the letter off with the owl and comes inside for breakfast, giving Marlene a kiss on the cheek as his passes. “How are you this morning, darling?” he asks, putting on the kettle.

“Better,” she says and smiles at him, just a little. 

They don’t speak about the night before; Sirius figures that if she wants to bring it up, she will, and there’s no point in rushing her. Their last full day in Corsica is spent soaking up the last of the sun, eating fish and chips on the beach and dunking each other in the waves.

It is, in Sirius’s opinion, the most perfect fake-dating beach holiday he can imagine.

  
  


viii.  
He returns to the Potters’ the next morning, hugging Marlene tightly and telling her to owl him before stepping into the fireplace. The house is quiet and still, just as he expected — the Potters are in India, and he has only come back to the house at all to get rid of his beach stuff before he goes to see Remus. 

After swapping out his shorts and swimmers for less optimistic clothing, he takes the floo to Remus, arriving in the Lupin living room where Remus is curled up on the sofa with a book, clearly awaiting his arrival. There’s absolutely nothing stopping Sirius from dropping his bag in front of the fire and kissing him where he had stood up at the sound of the fire flaring — so he does. It’s a relief to be able to drop any pretenses and be Sirius Black, In Love With Remus Lupin again. Remus’s parents are both at work, so they don’t even have to worry about potentially scandalising anyone who comes into the room.

“I missed you,” Sirius says, pulling back slightly.

“You did? I hadn’t the faintest idea,” Remus says with a smile. “I would’ve thought the scantily clad French boys would’ve driven me from your mind entirely.”

“Are you kidding?” Sirius retrieves a hand from where it had slipped under Remus’s shirt to gesture at him. “Why would I pay any attention to French boys when I could be thinking of you instead?”

Remus flushes and Sirius turns away from him to open up his bag. “I got you presents. It’s not chocolate, unfortunately, because they don’t seem to have much fancy chocolate that I could see. I wasn’t willing to brave the import issues around the endless supply of sausages, but I couldn’t remember if you like chestnuts?”

Remus makes a face and Sirius laughs. “I’ll have the chestnuts all to myself then. At least you’ll enjoy the nougat. Oh, and canistrelli — I forgot I had these. Little Corsican biscuits.”

Remus immediately goes for the biscuits, as Sirius knew he would. As he opens them he asks, “So how did the fake dating go? Marlene’s folks bearable?”

“Yeah, they weren’t too bad. We were mostly left to our own devices, actually, so it was just your usual beach holiday with a bit more cuddling than I’d usually do. There were a few weird moments, but we didn’t have to kiss even once, which I count as a success. Her parents loved me, of course.”

Remus very graciously allows Sirius to steal a biscuit.

“Marlene had a rubbish time of it though. Wasn’t sleeping or eating, so I finally cornered her a few nights before we left and it turns out she needed me to pretend to be her boyfriend because she’s gay and didn’t want her parents finding out.”

Remus looks up, alarmed. “Did she ask you because we—”

“No, no. She was surprised, actually. I told I got thrown out because I’m gay and then she guessed the person I had to ask before coming on the trip was you. I’m sorry, I didn’t ask you first, but — she looked awful, Moony. She was so — she thought she was broken, and I — she guessed it was you, and I ‘spose I wasn’t a very good actor, I’m sorry—”

“Shh, no, don’t worry,” Remus says, even though he had absolutely looked afraid before. “It’s fine, I just don’t want… once we leave school, I promise.”

“Yeah. I just — she was… I told her I would help her if she needed anything, that she should write to me.”

“Of course,” Remus says softly.

Sirius looks at him and is overwhelmed for a second how _good_ this is, how good they are — how wonderful it is that he’s in love. Fuck everyone else, how could what he and Remus have be wrong?

Trying to swallow the sudden emotion bubbling up inside him, he says, “So where else has Tibby vomited? In your shoes? On your books?”

Remus puts a hand over Sirius’s mouth before he finishes the sentence, muffling the ‘books’. “Don’t give him ideas, Padfoot! This is serious business!”

Sirius licks his palm, and Remus reflexively takes his hand back, wiping it on his jeans and shooting him a filthy look.

“D’you reckon I can teach him a lesson by being Padfoot?”

“Doubt it. He fears nothing. I can’t believe you — my books!”

“Tibby probably doesn’t understand English,” Sirius says, trying to sound reasonable. Clearly Remus had been stuck in this house too long, and has delusions about his opponent.

“Tibby absolutely understands English,” Remus says darkly. “And if you ever forget it, it’ll be your shoes at risk.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Sirius says. He’s confident he can take whatever this cat is dishing out. Padfoot could eat Tibby in two bites, there’s no way he would mess with him.

Remus has that look on his face where he’s trying very hard to remain cross with Sirius but failing.

“Incorrigible. You’re lucky I love you,” he says, shaking his head, and Sirius freezes.

“What?” Remus says, frowning.

“I — you can’t just _say_ it. That’s not allowed. I had a _plan_! It was going to be romantic!”

“Sorry, what are you talking about?” Remus is still wearing that adorably puzzled expression and Sirius wants to kiss it right off him and also he has to remember that Remus _stole_ this moment! He does not get kisses!

Instead, Sirius throws his hands up in the air. “You said you love me!”

“... Yes,” Remus says slowly. “It’s hardly the first time I’ve done it.”

“Yes it is!” Sirius insists, his voice pitched embarrassingly high.

“That’s demonstrably not true. Ask James, I bet you he’s on my side.”

“Yeah, but — I — All the other times were different, weren’t they!”

Remus makes a great show of considering this for a moment, before saying, “No, not really.”

For a moment, all Sirius can do is gape at him like a fish. Remus, the thief, seems to find this amusing and gently closes Sirius’s mouth before kissing him. Sirius kisses back for a moment before he remembers that Actually, He Is Angry.

“What do you mean not really,” he says, once he finally pulls himself away from kissing Remus. (Remus is very nice to kiss, and it’s absolutely not Sirius’s fault that he keeps getting distracted by it.)

“I loved you then, and I love you now, and I don’t know what you’re getting worked up about — surely you already knew.”

“Well, I mean, I hoped, but I hadn’t even — you—” Sirius breaks off, frustrated at his brain not making any coherent sentences. Finally he deflates a little and thinks of that night on the beach, looking up at the moon and how wonderful it had been to say it out loud.

“I love you too,” he says at last, and Remus beams at him.

**Author's Note:**

> eagle-eyed readers will also note that i referenced a scene of kayla's fic _[breathe](https://hpfanfictalk.com/archive/viewstory.php?sid=1066)_. this doesn't take place in that continuity, but when i was discussing with kayla how sirius got thrown out of home kayla was like [waves vaguely at breathe] and honestly, i couldn't be bothered to think of a better solution, so here we are :P a Kayla Easter Egg, if you will.
> 
> also i asked some french people (hi t-team-french!) about what things a tourist would bring back from corsica, preferably chocolate, and they were literally like "uhhh corsica is mostly known for sausages, cheese and chestnuts". so there you go.


End file.
